A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about calls to bring US-based scientists to Europe and other countries, given the US regime’s sabotage of American scientific research, both in universities and federal agencies. Since then, the “brain drain” topic has become even more visible, prompted by emerging efforts to recruit and support those scientists around Europe as well as the regime’s new efforts to block foreign students from getting visas. But none of that reporting or surrounding discourse includes the matter I raised in my initial blog post and which I recently came to some clarity about: namely, before someone moves to be a scientist in another country, they should decide what sort of immigrant they’re going to be. Conversely, before you recruit a scientist to come to your country, you have to make sure you're committed to screening for potential long-term migrants and supporting them when they arrive.
Some people are here (wherever the here is) temporarily, and they act like it: they don’t learn the language, don’t integrate, don’t make friends. When they leave after a short period, it appears they allocated their efforts correctly. Others dig in, which doesn’t mean the process is straightforward or easy, but they put their kids in local schools, study the language, develop meaningful social ties locally. Red flags are raised by the ones who are ostensibly here for the long-run but act like temporary migrants. It would be interesting to know how, in any migrant cross-section of a society, how many of each there are.
If I were doing science policy for the NWO, or the Max Planck Geselleschaft, or the European Commission and European Research Council, I’d want to make sure I was getting as many people as possible in the second group rather than the third. (It goes without saying you want to be clear about the first.) Doing so complicates the selection process, as you now have the task of assessing research quality (which is a dynamic, highly contested area but at least has tools, procedures, and a circumscribed discourse) as well as what I might call, for lack of a better term, “aptitude for immigration.”
Think of it this way: knowledge transfer is not like emptying a tanker truck’s contents into a local depot; knowledge production doesn’t happen by osmosis between a rotating cast of interchangeable human and technical parts. The project requires human stability in place, and in the face of intransigent, even hostile institutional arrangements.
There’s also the matter of return on investment: After an institution or government spends the financial and political capital bringing people to Europe (especially if it has made cuts to its endemic scientific infrastructure), they should make certain there is a high chance that the migrated scientists will stay and become productive. One way to do that is to make sure they can do their science successfully, but a more important way is to make sure they can be successful immigrants. That’s the thing that no one is talking about.
“Aptitude for immigration” could encompass a whole range of things, from personality traits of individuals (such as “openness to new experiences,” which is a standard item on psychology assessments) to previous language learning experience; volunteer experiences and other memberships; personal and familial affinities for certain cultural profiles of a receiving country. Such an aptitude can’t be quantified–but then research quality is increasingly not assessed solely in quantifiable terms. As I deal with in my day job, people are asked to write narrative CVs that help reviewers assess whether they can credibly do an innovative project. I could imagine that candidate scientist refugees from the US could be asked to assemble similar sorts of arguments about their fitness for mobility and integration.
In my original blog post, I discussed how Americans with no recent family history of migration don’t make very good immigrants; my argument is that we (I’m an American) lack easily accessible overarching narratives and models about experiences overseas that aren’t 1) temporary and 2) exploitative. They likely don’t have personal experiences of anything different, either. One might argue that people who are escaping repressive conditions can endure all sorts of inconveniences and hardships in a safer place, but I’d say that, at least so far, the US isn’t so thoroughly repressive or dangerous as some other places. At a certain point, you have to be as compelled by the pull of a place as the push of your origins.
Similarly, the science policy officers ought to consider how they’re going to enable permanent residence in their recruits, and not “permanent residence” as an administrative category but in terms of quality of life. You can get waive certain requirements (but don’t waive the language ones!); you can make bureaucratic pathways easier. But you also have to provide good housing, which is complicated; you have to ensure schooling for kids of a particular quality; you have to provide tax advice, because now you have people with property and pensions in two countries. If you don’t provide these sorts of resources, you are basically ensuring that your recruits will either leave or will become so unproductive in their new place that they shouldn’t have bothered. All this comes on top of what your recruits will require professionally: additional leeway in promotion pathways, lots of release time from teaching and funds for conference travel to build their European networks, and the like.
All this rolls up to this: in the realm of “brain catchment” science policy you want people who can lead regular, healthy, stable lives in a new country. Even if they are nationals from your country, they have likely been living elsewhere for a long time, so re-integrating them isn’t necessarily frictionless. All of these factors – the stability of family life, success at meeting personal aspirations, the development of local social networks – will influence the success of the science. I can point to research on women’s caregiving activities and research productivity (measured by number of publications) as evidence: what goes on at home definitely influences what happens in the lab, no matter how much you assert the contrary.
